StartupGrind

Startup Grind is a global startup community designed to educate, inspire, and connect entrepreneurs. It is powered by Google for Entrepreneurs. We host monthly events in 250 cities and 100 countries featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors who share personal stories and lessons learned on the road to building great companies.

Startup Grind is a connected online and offline network of vibrant startup communities to help fuel innovation, economic growth and prosperity at the local level. While Startup Grind was founded in Palo Alto, California, our extended network of Startup Grind chapters are located around the world. Start a Chapter in your city or school!

Our Values

We believe in making friends, not contacts. We believe in giving, not taking. We believe in helping others before helping yourself. We are truly passionate about helping founders, entrepreneurs and startups succeed. We intend to make their startup journey less lonely, more connected and more memorable.

The trick is this: on signup, Nextdoor allows users to select neighbor houses on a map. Once selected, these marked houses trip Nextdoor's USPS-powered growth hack: Nirav's company will mail a physical invitation letter through USPS to every single invited house – in the process spending millions of dollars.

Scaling Like Mad

According to Nirav, Nextdoor is a different type of network - and so much scale differently. On Facebook, you’re connected to your friends; on LinkedIn you’re connected to your business contacts; on Twitter you follow the people you aspire to know.

On Nextdoor you’re connected to people in your physical neighborhood and proximity.

The way the Nextdoor team looks at it, every neighborhood is its own startup. They’re not connected to other neighborhoods nor even connected internally.

But why is that important?

30% of Americans can’t name a single neighbor, let alone have their neighbor's email address - usually needed to refer users to new applications and platforms. Viral growth is impossible. Thus, enter the USPS.

Avoiding Schlep Blindness

Nextdoor is the quintessential example of doing things that don’t scale: they spent the first year calling every house they were onboarding, and a lot of time in peoples' living rooms trying to grow and refine the product-market fit. The results were inspiring: 175 neighborhoods on board.

Fast forward through years of the grind, Nextdoor's is aiming to serve the total 150,000 to 175,000 neighborhoods in the US now in the works, and is already more than halfway there.

You might not know your neighbors name, you might not have their number or email, but you surely know which building is their house. Now that's how a location=based network with 30% of people not even knowing a single neighbor's name was able to scale and think about their growth outside the box.

About the Author

I'm the founder and CEO of Voo (www.tryvoo.com) where people can follow businesses they go to all the time (restaurants, bars, etc.) and know what they're offering from happy hours to occupancy based pricing -- at the time they plan on doing something.
In a previous life I was a hedge fund analyst at Gottex Fund Management in Boston and passed all three levels of the CFA curriculum.